Today on a russian forum we actually came to the same idea - the suiciding problem just wasn't the reason of discussion. For lots of players the game is not about DayZ, it's about pew-pew'ing each other with nothing to lose. Especially with bugged loot all around. Okay, so the loot is fixed, it is harder to find now, but... is it really so hard to find? Especially for an experienced player? Once you know where you can find cool stuff, it's all about pew-pewing again. And it will be so on public servers up until even the average loot would be helluva difficult to find. Okay, Hicks talked yesterday about skills and how it's supposed to make players value their lifes more. Only that most of them wouldn't value the lifes more. Pew-pewing, remember? Why to worry about some virtual skills of fireplace crafting, when all I want is just to have a cool tacticool fight with mah friendz? It's not like skillz make killz in this game! Of course I am exaggerating - skills system will make some difference. But mostly, the picture will remain the same. For those pew-pewing players at least. But let's think about the situation where the time penalty for death is implemented. Not 24 hours (for true-hardcore servers tho...), but let's say 1-3 hours. Or even half a hour. You mindlessly go to the hot area, run across the city, get a bullet between the eyes... And suddenly you can't just respawn and try again. You are punished for your playstyle (no more pew-pewing with super-duper-fast respawn, alas), or maybe for that you didn't think twice before acting (duh, it's Elektro on a 50 full server, what could possibly go wrong), or maybe for your bad luck. Now you can take the blue one and ragequit, or you can take the red one and think what you should do so this wouldn't repeat. And be careful next time. Alright, so experienced players can do their colourful drugs and think about their doings. What about poor little newbs that were just so unlucky to buy the game and die immideately? The first solution that comes to mind - if you just bought your game, the timeouts are the same 30 secs for the first several deaths. them 5 mins for several next, and so on. And let's extrapolate it on bambies at all! You die a short time after respawn - you get a small but still palpable penalty. Seems legit? Well, it does for me! And after all... DayZ IS about hardcore, Rocket saw it this way, that's why we still lose all our gear upon death. It's just it is not enough anymore at this point. And one more thing. They could spend a lot of time balancing the loot system, changing loot tables and stuff. Or they could just change one value to another, watch for the reaction, change to another, etc. Just saying.
